Patients First to introduce secure email service for healthcare

Not-for-profit health IT organisation Patients First is set to launch a secure email platform for the New Zealand healthcare sector that is aimed at preventing data breaches while allowing for informal communication about patients between healthcare professionals.

Called ‘hMael’ and due to be made available before Christmas, the idea is not to supplant secure messaging but to provide a safe alternative to normal email for informal and ad hoc communication between healthcare workers. The basic system will be free of charge.

Patients First CEO Jayden MacRae said formal and structured health information like referrals and lab results must be sent by secure messaging, and the platform is not meant for communication with patients. Patients First supports the use of portals to provide secure electronic communication with patients.

“There is still a lot of education that needs to be done within health to make people aware that they shouldn’t be using ordinary email to send sensitive patient information,” Mr MacRae said.

“hMael will provide an opportunity to educate our health workers about this risky practice and provide them with a safe and secure alternative.”

According to the NZ Privacy Commissioner, the most common privacy breach was when electronic or physical information was sent to the wrong recipient. Patients First says hMael has a number of layers that help prevent similar data breaches.

The system is only available to those who work in the healthcare sector and have a duty of care with patient information. Healthcare professionals need to register online at www.hmael.nz and requests for an account will be reviewed and approved for health workers.

As the system will be closed, it will limit the possibility of sending sensitive information to unrelated parties. Users will be prevented from selecting addresses inadvertently from their normal email address book.

The ability to send messages to multiple people will also be limited, and it will contain further features for identification of the sender and recipient.

Patients First said the system is currently undergoing an independent security audit before it is launched to the whole health sector later this month. It is currently being used by a small number of beta testers throughout the country.

“We have already received considerable interest in hMael,” Mr MacRae said. “There are secure methods of electronically sharing formal and structured health information like referrals and laboratory results, but there is a need for a secure system that lets health workers share sensitive information in an informal and ad hoc fashion. This hasn’t existed before.”

Patients First is owned by the Royal New Zealand College of General Practice and General Practice New Zealand.

Perth Children’s Hospital EMR tender still being evaluated

WA Health is still evaluating a tender issued last year for an electronic medical record for the new Perth Children’s Hospital (PCH) but plans are still on track for the hospital to open using the BOSSNet scanned medical record as an interim measure.

The $1.2 billion, 298-bed PCH is being constructed at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in Nedlands to replace the aged Princess Margaret Hospital for Children as the state’s tertiary paediatric facility.

Originally scheduled to open this year, delays meant the opening date then had to be postponed until April 2016, with construction expected to be completed by this month. Announcing the delay in August, Health Minister Kim Hames said he wanted to avoid the same problems experienced with the commissioning and opening of Fiona Stanley Hospital (FSH).

However, as reported by the ABC, last month the state government had to admit that further construction delays had occurred and the hospital would not be complete until at least February next year. As the government needs five months to commission the hospital, this would push opening day into the winter flu season, which the AMA says it plans to oppose.

A Perth Children’s Hospital spokesperson said Core Medical Solutions’ BOSSNet scanned solution will be implemented at the hospital as planned, and this decision will not be affected by the revised construction timeline.

“The PCH project is now waiting for system upgrades which will have improved functionality to support use of the program at multiple hospital sites,” the spokesperson said. “These system upgrades will enable the best possible service to be provided to patients.”

The spokesperson said the tender for the provision of an EMR was still being evaluated.

The state’s budget deficit combined with the problems experienced at FSH have had a flow-on effect on WA Health’s clinical IT upgrade plans. An ambitious strategy involving many best-of-breed systems was envisaged in its 2010-2020 health ICT strategy, including the best of breed model at the flagship Fiona Stanley, replacement of Pathwest’s Ultra laboratory information system (LIS) and the statewide roll-out of CSC’s webPAS patient administration system.

The latter two are still on the cards, but the state government earlier this year approved an interim three-year strategy that focused on stabilising existing ICT systems rather than investing in new ones.

WebPAS has already been rolled out at a number of hospitals including FSH and will be implemented at PCH. A tender for a new LIS for Pathwest was issued earlier this year, specifying an off-the-shelf, single solution for both anatomical and clinical pathology.

The LIS replacement is an ongoing saga in itself, with an initial tender for the replacement of the existing Ultra system issued way back in 2011. Ultra’s owner, GE’s laboratory division Centricity, announced in 2010 that it would be decommissioned, but in 2013 Centricity was bought by Northern Irish firm Cirdan, which promised to continue supporting it.

It has been widely rumoured that the preferred option of clinicians involved in the tender for the PCH EMR is Epic, which is used in both paediatric and adult hospitals in the US and is set to roll out at Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne in April next year.

The PCH spokesperson said that until a decision on the tender had been made, no information could be released regarding the procurement process.

Australasian health IT week in review: October 3

Pulse+IT’s weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

For the love of Tetris: Tasmanian researchers ‘wire up’ players to study how gaming triggers emotions
ABC News ~ Damien Peck ~ 02/10/2015

It is not all fun and games for a group of Tasmanian researchers studying the range of emotions people experience while playing video games.


SA Health renal truck helps APY Lands patients return home during treatment
ABC News ~ Natalie Whiting ~ 02/10/2015

Dozens of Indigenous people from South Australia’s remote APY Lands have been forced to relocate to receive treatment for kidney disease.


GPs are quite upset’: Owler speaks out about Four Corners report
Medical Observer ~ Julie Lambert ~ 01/10/2015

AMA President Brian Owler has slammed the unfair treatment of GPs in an ABC TV’s Four Corners program, saying it gave an inaccurate view of how GPs care for patients.


Lift-off for NBN’s long-term satellite
iTNews ~ Andrew Sadauskas ~ 01/10/2015

NBN has successfully launched the first of its two Sky Muster satellites in French Guiana this morning, although end-users will still have to wait until next year before they can receive services.


Cost of doctor visits putting off rural Australians: report
The Conversation ~ Sasha Petrova ~ 01/10/2015

In some parts of Australia, two to three times more people are avoiding seeing their doctor because they can’t afford it, according to figures released today.


Aged care: Health Minister Sussan Ley picks up extra portfolio
Sydney Morning Herald ~ Jane Lee ~ 30/09/2015

Health Minister Sussan Ley has been sworn in as the Minister for Aged Care, more than a week after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s new cabinet was announced.


Tasmanian Government reveals five providers selected to cut elective surgery waiting lists
ABC News ~ Rosemary Bolger ~ 30/09/2015

Five private health services from Tasmania and Victoria have been selected to perform up to $25 million of taxpayer-funded elective surgeries


Sussan Ley appointed Minister for Aged Care
Australian Ageing Agenda ~ Darragh O’Keefe ~ 30/09/2015

Aged care is set to move department again – for the second time in two years.


ProCare GPs to be told they must become shareholders
NZ Doctor ~ Cliff Taylor ~ 30/09/2015

ProCare Health Ltd will soon require all its GP providers to buy a share in the company, whether they want to or not.


Warning over ‘Uberisation’ of medicine
Australian Doctor ~ Tessa Hoffman ~ 30/09/2015

A new service offering pay-by-the-minute GP telephone consults has been branded ‘Uber for medicine’ by health information experts.


NZ has the fastest 4G speeds in the world
stuff.co.nz ~ Staff writer ~ 30/09/2015

New Zealand has dethroned Australia as the nation with the fastest 4G networks in the world, according to a new report.


UK pharmacy chain Boots to roll out Orion Health software
ZDNet ~ Rob O’Neill ~ 29/09/2015

UK pharmacy chain Boots has chosen technology from New Zealand-based Orion Health to support the delivery of in-store clinical services.


A slur on all doctors’: Owler blasts Ley over MBS comments
Medical Observer ~ Julie Lambert ~ 28/09/2015

Health Minister Sussan Ley has broken faith with the medical profession by reframing the MBS review and suggesting doctors ignore patients’ best interests by sending them for unnecessary tests, the AMA says. 


One-third of health budget wasted, investigation finds
Medical Observer ~ David Rowley ~ 28/09/2015

Unnecessary tests and procedures are wasting almost a third of the national health budget, an ABC TV Four Corners report tonight will claim. 


Queensland launches 20-year, $1.26 billion health ICT strategy

Queensland Health has developed a strategy for health ICT and eHealth that calls for an investment of more than $1.2 billion over the next 20 years, including $730 million for clinical software such as a new patient administration system, rolling out the Cerner integrated electronic medical record (ieMR) to more hospitals and the replacement of the ageing Auslab statewide pathology system.

Clinical applications represent 58 per cent of the total investment required, with a further $300 million required for ICT infrastructure, $100 million for business systems and $130 million for the “digital future”, including implementing interoperability standards, patient and provider identity systems, clinical terminology services, patient portals and enhancements to The Viewer, the web-based application that provides clinicians with a view of patient information and the PCEHR.

Cerner will be one of the big winners of the strategy, with its ieMR rolled out to 12 more hospitals in addition to the existing nine, and four smaller, rural hospitals to receive the ‘lite’ version.

Launching the strategy at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) function in Brisbane today, Queensland Health Minister Cameron Dick also announced that one of Queensland’s flagship tertiary hospitals, the Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) in Brisbane, was set to go digital in November, rolling out the full Cerner EMR and going as paperless as possible.

Mr Dick said he had been briefed on the precarious state of health ICT in Queensland when Labor came into government earlier this year, with 16 ICT systems having a risk profile that was high or extreme. The legacy Auslab pathology results system was rated as one of the highest risks.

It is also well known that the 25-year-old HBCIS patient administration system is on its last legs.

Mr Dick said the briefing told him there had been an increase in significant ICT outages, primarily due to ageing infrastructure, unsupported software versions and “a break/fix approach to asset replacement”.

Before detailing the new strategy, Mr Dick accepted responsibility for the Queensland Health payroll disaster that the previous Labor government presided over and offered an apology.

“As a Labor Minister I am acutely aware of the history of ICT roll-outs in health,” he said. “Put simply, the introduction of a new payroll system under the previous Labor government was a disaster.

“It was a disaster for the department which had its credibility in relation to the delivery of complex IT projects severely damaged. Politically, it was disaster for a government already struggling on a number of fronts. Today, I apologise for this.”

He said that as an organisation Queensland Health now had to move on, and this meant “confronting the fact that we have a significant future role in the delivery of complex system wide ICT changes”.

The eHealth Investment Strategy has been developed in partnership with all 16 of the state’s Hospital and Health Services (HHSs) and provided a 20-year investment profile focused on key priorities, he said.

These include:

“The strategy also addresses legacy system risks and ensures a greater level of integration between both public and private health service providers and the community,” he said.

“Strategic investment is particularly important in these times of fiscal constraint and we are moving forward with detailed planning works, with a diligent approach to implementation.

“Queensland Health will over time do the hard painstaking work to develop the business cases, to partner with the industry and to identify savings to help fund this important plan.”

Strategic overview

The strategy itself provides a comprehensive view of the collectively identified ICT investment priorities across the health system.

“These priorities have been indicatively costed, and includes contextual information that underpins the prioritisation order and overarching plan, to which each investment priority aligns,” it says.

The strategy has four categories:

One of the greatest areas of investment need is the replacement and enhancement of core infrastructure, the strategy says. This will require an estimated $230m for capital asset replacement, the infrastructure required for digital hospitals, identity management and telehealth provision.

“Years of under investment in ICT and poor ICT project delivery performance has resulted in out- of-date infrastructure, ageing technology, and highly customised and heavily integrated bespoke systems,” it says. “These are costly to replace and difficult to sustainably support.

Network speed and connectivity across the regions will need to be improved and standardised, and Queensland Health’s current immobile technology platform improved to cater to an increasingly mobile workforce.

“Mobile devices, remote monitoring of patients, integration with biomedical devices at the bedside and improved access to online patient information and clinicians requires high grade, high availability digital connectivity, supported by appropriate mobile, point of care technologies,” it says.

An investment is also required in improved identity management, which will allow QH to integrate better with the Healthcare Identifier (HI) Service, the National Health Service Directory (NHSD) and the PCEHR.

It also forecasts the need for about $30m for a contemporary desktop, including a replacement of the current Windows XP desktop environment which the strategy says inhibits upgrades to existing clinical and system support applications.

Cloud-based solutions need to be investigated as they will offer an integrated device and user productivity suite that enables the connectivity of information and functionality.

“Queensland Health has conducted a pilot of cloud- based services and now needs to provision the connectivity, access and integration of the user productivity suite across the ICT system.”

It forecasts that $100m will be needed for business systems to rationalise the more than 30 enterprise-wide support systems across the ICT portfolio currently used and the total replacement of the customised SAP finance system.

This system is used by all HHSs but has been unsupported by the vendor since 2006. The strategy emphasises that the replacement of this system will be a significant investment, so prior to statewide deployment, the solution will be initially implemented at two HHSs and at the department itself.

eHealth architecture foundations will require about $100m of an overall $130 investment in “the digital future”. The foundations include clinical data repositories and business intelligence solutions to support new patient, community and clinician portals and to help manage large datasets.

Another $30m will be needed for information interoperability to support sharing of information between HHSs and other healthcare providers, along with enhancements to The Viewer.

“Queensland Health needs a scalable, information-sharing capability that is open-standards based, reliable, flexible and allows interoperability between new and existing systems (preferably as ‘plug-and-play’ components),” it says.

“This needs to have minimal fragile and expensive integrations that is also highly secure to ensure data integrity and protect patient privacy.”

Clinical systems

Queensland Health has more than 55 enterprise clinical systems across the ICT portfolio, the strategy says, so QH has prioritised five distinct areas for investment:

HBCIS, the current PAS, has been “extensively tailored” to meet Queensland Health requirements but can no longer support a modern patient administration system. QH says $210m will be required to replace the current system with a modern solution that builds on the current clinical and supply chain capabilities.

A further $376m will be required to roll out the ieMR, which is currently installed in nine hospitals. Queensland Health is planning to invest in 21 digital hospitals and four ‘lite’ implementations.

“Digital hospitals are proven to deliver a wide spectrum of benefits in terms of increased patient safety, healthcare quality, early detection and monitoring of possible adverse clinical events, reductions in readmissions, improved patient flow and realisable cost savings,” it says.

“The long-term strategy for Queensland is a digital HHS. This vision offers a fully integrated healthcare system across care settings enabling our HHSs to work seamlessly together and with healthcare providers and partners across the state.”

It estimates that $75m will be needed for a new pathology system to replace Auslab, which is at the end of its life and is unable to meet the current needs of Pathology Queensland.

“The timing of the pathology information system replacement lends itself to an opportunity to fully integrate with the ieMR and digital hospital initiative. The HHS benefits will be realised through the integration of pathology, medical imaging and medications interactions.”

$7m will be required to improve access to electronic health records from primary and community care sites and to support care being delivered remotely through telehealth or other similar technologies. It foresees the need to rationalise disparate ICT systems into a single solution at multiple primary and community care sites.

And $62m will be required for a digital imaging and transmission platform that is integrated with the ieMR.

“Investment in the safe and secure exchange of digital information provides opportunities to leverage a broader spectrum of health services and provide opportunities to share [lessons] and solutions with healthcare partners,” the strategy says.

“Complementing the ieMR, this investment enables a complete view of the patient history, including medical imaging and diagnostics, and results reporting, irrespective of location.”

HealthConnex on FHIR in the wild with TCM interface

Telstra Health’s wholly owned subsidiary HealthConnex has launched a new version of its The Care Manager (TCM) case management software for aged and community care that can interoperate with the company’s MyCareManager client portal through a FHIR interface.

In what is thought to be one of the first instances of the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard being using in the wild, version 7.16 of TCM will be able to interface with MyCareManager to provide home care clients with easy access to the new monthly financial statements they are receiving as part of the consumer-directed care (CDC) reforms.

While MyCareManager can be used as a complete home telehealth solution, it is the client portal functionality that is being harnessed in this instance. TCM users will be able to register clients for MyCareManager directly from TCM, publish their statements or other information to the portal and to allow them to view their appointment lists.

While it will initially be one-way communication from service provider to client, the plan is that in future clients will be able to interact with their providers through the portal – for example booking services directly – and their information will be directly loaded back into TCM. This is all made possible through the FHIR interface without having to undertake extensive integration work between different systems.

Peter Dannock, general manager for TCM at HealthConnex, said TCM was just one of the many client management systems that are out there that could hook into the portal via FHIR.

“It’s quite universal in the sense of what we can do there,” Mr Dannock said. “It also gives us capabilities across our own portfolio of products.

“Sometimes with our customer base we’re sourcing client records from other systems, like a patient management system, and we’ve tended to do bespoke interfaces between those other systems. FHIR gives you some opportunity to have a more generic interface.”

As well as being part of the wider Telstra Health family, HealthConnex itself has a disparate portfolio of software packages and secure messaging services. As well as TCM, it markets the Communicare clinical software package popularly used by indigenous healthcare providers and an enterprise level management solution called Aged and Community Care (ACC).

It also includes the Argus secure messaging service used by general practitioners, allied health professionals, specialists and hospitals, along with the ConnectingCare secure messaging and referral system for health and community services and its ConnectingCare Worker for roster distribution.

Mr Dannock said FHIR would enable the company to bring a consolidated view of information from multiple sources together, much more easily than has been possible in the past.

“The example I would give is that we get requests sometimes where we have a Communicare customer who also extends their service to community aged care. So what they would need is TCM, but they’ve already got Communicare, so how could we create a single picture of a client or a source of truth on that client across those systems? We think that FHIR can provide that capability for us very quickly.”

TCM has been built to manage multiple government-funded programs and allows organisations to electronically manage and process referrals, develop care plans and clinical histories as well as manage individual client’s financial transactions such as invoicing and payments.

Last year, HealthConnex released a version of TCM with self-directed care capabilities in advance of the looming deadline of July 1 2015, when the Commonwealth’s Home and Community Care (HACC) packages moved to CDC.

Mr Dannock said that version had been available for nine to 12 months to get HACC providers used to CDC. The new version, 7.16, includes all of that functionality along with some additional features such as the ability to update subsidies and supplements when the new fee structures are released.

HealthConnex is also planning to fine-tune this functionality over the next 12 months to also support its disability care customers in advance of the full implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

“Self-directed care is not quite the same in disability as it is in aged care, but we see this functionality as also supporting disability organisations in the future,” Mr Dannock said.

Also in the future, providers of home care packages – more extensive support programs to enable people with more complex needs to stay at home longer – will also come under the CDC banner as the packages are merged with HACC as part of the new, single Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP).

These are vast changes that the aged, disability and community care sectors are still grappling with and have meant a lot of work for aged and community care software providers.

However, Mr Dannock believes that in the longer term, FHIR will provide companies with the ability to run software like TCM more as a back-office solution, with its users and their clients interacting through a portal.

“Users that were traditionally TCM users will now become online users working through a portal, whether it be a worker portal or a client portal,” he said. “That’s where our growth in users is going to come from, so we will probably see organisations having a steady number of TCM users, but a lot more online users feeding information in.”

Tender goes out for national cancer screening register

The federal Department of Health (DoH) has issued a request for tender for a new ICT system to build a National Cancer Screening Register, which will see the results of cervical and bowel cancer screening communicated through the PCEHR.

The federal government announced in the May budget that it would set up a new register to support a revised national bowel cancer screening program as well as a new national cervical cancer program that will see a primary human papillomavirus (HP) test replace the current Pap test for cervical screening from May 2017.

The government says it intends that the register will include a single participant record, streamlined reporting and the use of the PCEHR and eHealth foundation systems to enable participants and health professionals to provide, update and receive information.

It will bring together the different state and territory cervical screening registers and will also support the transition from a paper-based system for the bowel cancer register to a more streamlined system.

Health Minister Sussan Ley said in May that the register will provide a template for any future national population screening tests.

“It can be difficult to keep track of your screening requirements, which is why we are investing in the creation of a single national screening register for cancers to ensure all Australians can remain up to date,” Ms Ley said.

The two screening programs will involve up to 1.4 million eligible women and 9.5 eligible people to participate in cervical and bowel cancer screening respectively. The register will also support the reminder and follow-up systems, the tender documents say.

The tender is for not just the register and its ICT services, but for operator services for the national bowel cancer screening program and, at the discretion of each state and territory government, the operator services for the cervical screening program.

The department wants the provision of the register, its ICT services and the operator services as a fully managed service. While the various state health departments and cancer institutes manage the statewide Pap test registers, the national bowel screening program is managed by the Department of Human Services/Medicare on behalf of DoH.

The register will provide an ongoing data feed to DoH’s enterprise data warehouse, which will be responsible for all strategic reporting to register stakeholders, except individuals. The PCEHR will be the mechanism that provides information to individuals, the documents say.

The winning bidder will also be required to manage individual responses to invitations to be screened or re-screened. Individuals can opt out of the program but if they agree to a screening, the operator will be required to register their participation details, including their nominated healthcare professional and their preferred communication channel.

The department expects to sign a contract in February or March next year, with a go-live date of May 1, 2017, in tandem with the listing of the HP screening test on the MBS.

How to take smart assistive technologies into the mainstream

The Queensland government has funded a new portal being launched next week to provide information on smart assistive technologies to consumers and home and community care providers.

Developed by innovation facilitator Community Resourcing, the Community Care Smart Assistive Technology Collaborative Platform will initially target the thousand or so Queensland-based home and community care providers for under 65s, particularly those involved in the roll-out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

However, Community Resourcing’s Anne Livingstone said the portal would be open to community care providers on a nationwide and international scale.

The portal was developed following a statewide roadshow held last year that visited 13 sites to raise awareness of the role that smart assistive technologies can play in service delivery, particularly for Home and Community Care (HACC) package providers who are transitioning into the new Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP) and for those providing services that will be funded through the NDIS.

Ms Livingstone said that following the roadshow, Community Resourcing received funding to build a collaborative platform that would allow the government to address some gaps in community care provision, but would also help build a community of practice and to increase the uptake of smart assistive technologies by consumers.

Project lead Liz Dodd said the platform would promote the use of assistive technologies and service provision through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

“Its purpose is to raise the awareness of the various roles of smart assistive technology and its applicability in community care provision, and also to provide practical information on how it can be incorporated into service delivery,” Ms Dodd said.

While it will initially target service providers in Queensland, it has a much wider potential, she said.

“This issue is one where a global approach is often the best approach and so we have a mission to engage those targeted providers but also the rest of the nation and indeed internationally.

“Some of the initial information on the site is quite internationally focused. For example, we’ll highlight things like some of the work that is being done with driverless vehicles.”

Kevin Doughty, a well-known expert in assistive technologies and telecare who is the director of the Centre for Usable Home Technologies at Coventry University and a regular visitor to Australia, is on the reference group advising on the project and will attend and speak at the launch in Brisbane.

Another international expert advising on the portal is Denmark’s Carrie Peterson, an expert in the use of technology in dementia care and what she calls ‘gerontechnology’.

Ms Dodd said that while it would not have an initial focus on vendors, the organisation understood it was critically important to work closely with technology developers. However, this also included those technologies or concepts that were not necessarily commercially viable but had the potential to have an impact, she said.

“Some of it could be a smart idea that is consumer driven, that might be significantly important for a particular person to help them live independently.”

Ms Livingstone said a particular interest of Community Resourcing was working with organisations that are consumer focused and consumer outcome driven, including aged care providers such as Feros Care.

The company works across the primary healthcare sector but focuses more on service model design, workforce implications and the funding and policy mechanisms around introducing innovation rather than the technology.

“Generally we work around technology but we are not technologists,” she said. “For example, we are working with the CSIRO on the Smarter Safer Homes platform, working behind the scenes and assisting to translate the research into practice

“We have worked closely with government promoting how uptake might occur and about how innovative approaches to funding can see more widespread adoption. A particular interest for us is how you get the pilots and the few providers who are mainstreaming to scale up.”

The portal will be officially launched at a workshop being held by Dr Doughty on embedding and mainstreaming smart assistive technology in community service provision at the RNA Showgrounds in Brisbane on Tuesday, September 8.

VC funding in healthcare IT surpasses $1.2 billion in Q2 2015

Cumulative global funding for ventures in digital health and healthcare information technology (HIT) surpassed the billion-dollar mark in the second quarter of 2015, according to Mercom Capital Group’s latest market report.

The report covers mergers and acquisitions M&A and takes into account deals of all sizes, including private equity and corporate venture capital raised by digital healthcare start-ups and companies across the globe.

VC funding in the digital health sector witnessed an impressive 53 per cent increase in the second quarter of 2015 over the first, with 138 deals netting $US1.2 billion, compared to $784 million raised through 142 deals in the previous quarter.

Debt and public market financing in the digital health sector has increased to $1.6 billion, with capital being raised in eight big market deals, including four IPOs, taking the aggregated corporate funding in health IT to $2.8 billion in Q2 2015.

Mercom Capital Group CEO Raj Prabhu said more money had flowed through IPOs than venture capital in this quarter, which he said was an encouraging sign as it opens up a new avenue for raising funding and an exit path for investors.

“However, out of the 14 IPOs since 2012, six IPOs have decreased in valuation,” Mr Prabhu said.

From a year-on-year perspective, VC funding for digital health almost reached the $2 billion mark in the first half of 2015, compared to $2.6 billion raised during the same period in 2014.

The report shows there has been a sharp increase in funds raised by both patient-centric companies and consumer-centric companies, with patient-centric companies raising $473 million in 41 deals compared to $347 million in 44 deals in Q1 2015 and consumer-centric companies raising $724 million in 97 deals compared to $437 million in 98 deals in Q1 2015.

The areas that received the highest investment include mobile health companies ($214 million), followed by clinical decision systems ($206 million), personal health/wellness companies ($209 million), telehealth companies ($152 million), data analytics firms ($91 million), and electronic health record companies ($26 million).

A total of 271 investors including two accelerators/incubators participated in healthcare IT deals this year, with the highest number of funding deals closed by Venrock, followed by 500 Startups, Cambia Health Solutions, Qualcomm Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Rock Health, Slow Ventures and Tencent Holdings.

Globally, US companies raised more than $1 billion in 111 deals, with other transactions spanning across European nations like Finland, Germany, Netherlands and Asian countries like China, India and Singapore.

As far as mergers and acquisitions are concerned, there were 53 M&A transactions (eight disclosed) in the health IT sector in the following quarter, compared to 56 transactions (14 disclosed) in Q1 2015. Practice-focused companies accounted for 43 of the total M&A transactions with, while consumer-centric companies had 10 transactions.

Out of the top five M&A transactions in Q2 2015, four US-based companies bagged a net total of $698.5 million, with acquisition of Virtual Radiologic Corporation (vRad), a provider of teleradiology and telemedicine services being the largest disclosed M&A transaction at $500 million.

Australian firm PJA Solutions, which specialises in laboratory information systems, was the only Australian company to make it to the top five following its $45 million acquisition by the Citadel group.

HIC2015: Qld Health restructures with dedicated eHealth division

The Queensland government has set up a dedicated eHealth division called eHealth Queensland, bringing together the responsibilities of the Health Services Information Agency (HSIA) with the office of the chief health information officer, currently held by Mater Health CIO Mal Thatcher.

Health Minister Cameron Dick told the Health Informatics Conference (HIC) in Brisbane today that the government believed that having Queensland Health’s strategic and operational information technology leadership in one agency would better enable it to achieve its eHealth goals.

“We are committed to a fully integrated health system with a mobile workforce that can access information as quickly and as close to the patient as possible,” Mr Dick said.

“Our eHealth investment priorities include contemporary network and data centre foundations, a contemporary desktop environment to support a consistent user experience, a secure environment to share information and images, and to consult with others through an information interoperability platform and a statewide electronic medical record system that enables digital hospitals.”

Mr Dick said Queensland would continue the roll-out of the integrated electronic medical record solution (ieMR) in staged releases at selected state hospitals. The solution, from global EMR giant Cerner, supports order entry, pathology and radiology results, reporting, clinical documentation, alerts and allergies, and discharge summaries.

Queensland is also implementing a statewide patient information viewing solution called The Viewer that provides Queensland Health clinicians with faster access to comprehensive current patient information in one place. The Viewer is also Queensland’s link to the PCEHR.

“Queensland is also recognised as a leader in the adoption of national eHealth standards, solutions and infrastructure,” Mr Dick said. “Queensland Health recently launched an eHealth architecture vision which will form the basis the development of our technology roadmap. It will service our clinicians, consumers and administrators across the healthcare system, delivering quality information and better health outcomes for patients.”

He also asserted the government’s commitment to telehealth, also an area championed by his predecessor as health minister, Lawrence Springborg. With the state of Queensland five times the size of Japan and seven times the size of the UK – “and my favourite, two and half times the size of Texas”, Mr Dick said – the state faced bigger challenges than most in providing healthcare to its people.

“That’s why I am particularly interested in telehealth,” he said. “Telehealth, as many of you know, plays a key role in providing access and sustainable care for rural and remote communities in particular. Queensland currently has one of the largest managed telehealth networks in Australia with over 2000 systems deployed in over 200 hospitals and community facilities. The network supports more than 40 clinical specialties and subspecialties across our state.

“I saw this in operation myself in Mt Isa when I was connected through the telehealth system on an iPad to a clinic in Mornington Island, which is in the Gulf of Carpentaria. So you can be in the ED in Mt Isa Hospital and connect through telehealth on the iPad to the health clinic and the staff there at Mornington Island. And that’s the future.

“We will jump a generation of technology and ultimately we will be having that connection with patients in their home, across the internet. In the future that’s how patients will be connecting with their clinicians, with their rehab specialists, with their allied health specialists, with their nursing support and it will happen over the internet from their home. In many ways, that wasn’t even contemplated 22 years ago when this conference was first held.”

HIC2015: Telstra adds to analytics capability with Health IQ

Telstra Health has added another string to its bow with the acquisition of Melbourne-based data analysis, patient flow management and queue management specialist Health IQ.

Health IQ was first established in 1996 by former McDonnell Douglas-CSC staff who were then joined by current executive director Dave Piggott in 1999. Until the Telstra Health takeover it was owned and managed by Mr Piggott and original founder Paul Phelan.

The company specialises in patient flow management software for inpatients, queue management software for outpatients and also has a data capture and warehousing component called Health Central.

Health Central acts as a data repository that integrates with all of the core hospital systems and consists of 20-odd data models for different aspects of hospital activity such as theatre management, bed management, costing, finance and outpatients.

Mr Piggott said the value of Health Central is in its analytics. It’s able to capture and warehouse the data while third-party data visualisation products like Dr Foster’s Quality Investigator or QlikView sit on top.

“Tasmania has Health Central installed for the whole state and they look at the performance of things like the waiting list and ED across the whole state,” he said.

“We’ve also just started implementing our queue management product into the oncology department at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital.”

Mr Piggott said Health IQ will become part of Telstra Health’s informatics arm, which is overseen by neurosurgeon and former Gold Coast Hospital CEO Adrian Nowitzke, where it will join other acquisitions such as Dr Foster.

“Dr Foster does all of the analysis of data but they don’t have a live feed,” Mr Piggott said. “Now they have bought us, we can provide a live feed with Health Central. With patient flow and queue management, we are providing additional information on the patient load that can then help with the analytics.”

In other Telstra Health news from HIC 2015, well-known eHealth standards and pathology IT expert Vince McCauley has joined wholly owned Telstra Health subsidiary Emerging Systems as chief medical officer.